Owen Jones: The UK media has ignored this hugely revealing scandal

The National

16 hours ago

And yet Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli prime minister subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant – has been accused of forging this alliance by the Israeli political class. And yet – once again – the Westminster media has overwhelmingly failed to cover this latest profoundly revealing scandal.
Avigdor Lieberman is a far-right opposition leader who once served as Netanyahu's deputy prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister. This week, he publicly announced: 'The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister.'
Did Netanyahu come out swinging, accusing his opponent of antisemitism, as he did when another opposition leader, former Israeli general Yair Golan, declared that Israel was killing babies as a hobby?
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He did not. Instead, Netanyahu bragged that 'Israel is working to defeat Hamas in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment'. In a video message, he clarified that Israel had 'activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas', shamelessly calling it 'a good thing' which was saving the lives of Israeli soldiers. 'What's wrong with that?'
We're talking here about a militia headed by a man named Yasser Abu Shabab. He styles his faction as the 'Anti Terror Service', but it is a criminal gang operating in an area of Rafah firmly under Israeli military control. His own family has not only disowned him, but backed his execution. According to Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, his militia is composed of 300 'drug dealers and criminals.'
And here's the important detail. To justify imposing a total siege on Gaza, Israel claimed that Hamas was stealing humanitarian food. Among those pointing out this wasn't true was Cindy McCain, widow of the late hawkish Republican senator John McCain, and now director of the World Food Programme. But we do know that Shabab's Israel-backed gang has been stealing aid. As ever with the Israeli authorities: every accusation is a confession.
This is just another plank of Israel's starvation policy. But again, the Western media has overwhelmingly failed to clearly spell out what Israel is actually doing. Having imposed a total siege on Gaza since March 2, Israel set up a US-backed shadow entity named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to explicitly supplant the UN. It hasn't just been rejected by every aid agency – even the US marine who heads it resigned on the basis it contradicted the basic principles of humanitarianism.
The Foundation set three aid checkpoints in the south in an effort to concentrate Gaza's entire population into a confined area – a concentration camp. Too little aid was delivered, much of it unusable given the siege on cooking materials. But in any case, the Israeli military repeatedly fired on starving Palestinians. In the words of Tory MP Kit Malthouse, the UN system had been replaced with a 'shooting range, an abattoir'.
But when the Israeli military massacred dozens of starving Palestinians, they deployed their usual strategy: deceive, deflect, deny, distort. Even though the shootings happened in an Israeli military zone, and despite the overwhelming evidence of Israeli lies, the
Western media indulged Israeli claims that Hamas was responsible as if they were credible. CNN belatedly published a clear rebuttal of Israeli lies, but attention had already moved on. As ever, the Western media overall fail to allow Israeli responsibility for atrocities to stick.
And yet now, even as Yair Lapid – the main opposition leader – states Netanyahu is 'giving weapons to organisations close to ISIS in Gaza', this latest plank of Israel's starvation strategy barely gets any coverage. This is despite Israel's 'Hamas is ISIS' campaign long being used to justify the genocide.
This all fits a classic pattern, of course. Israel encouraged the rise of Hamas in the 1980s in order to undermine its public enemy number one at the time, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. More recently, Netanyahu worked with Qatar to transfer money to prop up Hamas – with the hope of dividing the Palestinian nation and movement so an independent state was impossible. Remember too how the West armed and backed the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, playing a crucial role in creating the global Islamist fundamentalist movement. You would think the Western media might take an interest given the precedents.
It is true that there is a shift taking place. Israeli spokespeople are suddenly being taken apart on mainstream television. Sky News is demanding the Prime Minister answer if genocide is taking place. But the media narrative still has not clearly shifted to reality – that is, a crime of historic proportions is being facilitated by Western governments, which means questions should be focused on 'how can this crime be stopped, and perpetrators held to justice' rather than 'is Israel doing something very bad here?'
The latter is an improvement on where the narrative was stuck for so long – which was essentially 'Israel is waging a war of self-defence', with a side debate about whether the 'response' was 'proportionate'.
What is clear is that an understanding is creeping into the political and media elites that a reckoning is coming, where those who facilitated this abomination will be forced to answer for what they did and what they didn't do. Time is running out.